Reviewed Resource

Control Engineering presents a Reviewed Resource: the PTO white paper “PROFIBUS PA vs. Foundation Fieldbus, a cost comparison.”Read the review, then read the actual paper.(Unfortunately, the Control Engineering link to the paper itself is broken, but you can find the paper on the PTO’s White Papers page, including an audio version.)Feel free to comment on the paper in this space.Author James Powell will be happy to respond.

Also from Peter Welander of Control Engineering, this time in his blog, Pillar to Post, a posting called “Which Profibus for instrumentation?”The answer “Depends.”Click over there for the in-depth answer.

PTO member Molex (nee Woodhead) has a video presentation on Control Engineering’s video site, CE TV.Look for “Solutions for Plant Floor Ethernet Adoption” on the table of contents page.I can mention this since they use two of the magic P-words (PROFIBUS and PROFINET).

I’m still in the office.This lack of business travel is unsettling.I’m really used to being on the road, training engineers on PROFINET.The good news is that the time in the office allows me to revamp, tweak, and update the training material in concert with my colleagues from the PROFI Interface Center.When we hit the road in March (the 11th in Portland, followed by a PROFINET Developer Workshop the next morning), we’ll be ready with new information and more relevant demos.The demos are a much-valued part of the classes according to the Course Evaluation forms we see.If you haven’t attended one of our webinars or classes, you can get some insight into how we approach this in the Automation World article “Tips from the Pros to Make Training Stick.”